Disparate Regimes

Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865–1965
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-0-19-766053-9
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 22 mm, Gewicht: 550 g

Historians have well described how US immigration policy increasingly fell under the purview of federal law and national politics in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. It is far less understood that the rights of noncitizen immigrants in the country remained primarily contested in the realms of state politics and law until the mid-to-late twentieth century. Such state-level political debates often centered on whether noncitizen immigrants should vote, count as part of the polity for the purposes of state legislative representation, work in public and publicly funded employment, or obtain professional licensure. Enacted state alienage laws were rarely self-executing, and immigrants and their allies regularly challenged nativist restrictions in court, on the job, by appealing to lawmakers and the public, and even via diplomacy. Battles over the passage, implementation, and constitutionality of such policies at times aligned with and sometimes clashed against contemporaneous efforts to expand rights to marginalized Americans, particularly US-born women. Often considered separately or treated as topics of marginal importance, Disparate Regimes underscores the centrality of nativist state politics and alienage policies to the history of American immigration and citizenship from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that the proliferation of these debates and laws produced veritable disparate regimes of citizenship rights in the American political economy on a state-by-state basis. It further illustrates how nativist state politics and alienage policies helped to invent and concretize the idea that citizenship rights meant citizen-only rights in law, practice, and popular perception in the United States.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Shanahan, Brendan A.

Fachgebiete

• Rechtswissenschaften Recht, Rechtswissenschaft Allgemein Rechtsgeschichte, Recht der Antike
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Introduction: Citizenship Rights as Citizen-Only Rights in American History

- PART I. CONTESTING DISPARATE REGIMES OF CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

- 1: Creating Disparate Regimes in the Polity: Noncitizens, Political Rights, and Nineteenth-Century State Constitutional Politics

- 2: Disputing Disparate Regimes in Employment: Blue-Collar Nativist State Hiring Laws in the Late Gilded Age and Progressive Era

- PART II. INVENTING CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS AS CITIZEN-ONLY RIGHTS IN THE POLITY

- 3: Making Voters Citizens: Repealing Alien Suffrage via State Constitutional Amendment Campaigns, 1894-1926

- 4: Who Counts in the Polity? Noncitizens, Apportionment, and Representation in the Early to Mid-Twentieth Century

- PART III. CONCRETIZING CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS AS CITIZEN-ONLY RIGHTS

- 5: Learning Citizenship Matters: Immigrant Professionals and State Anti-alien Hiring and Licensure Laws, 1917-52

- 6: Embedding American Citizenship and Citizenship Rights: Marital Repatriation Law from the Women's Suffrage Movement to the Cold War

- Conclusion: A "Lost Century," a Reboot, or an Uninterrupted Struggle? Citizenship Rights as Citizen-Only Rights

Über Autor(innen)

Brendan A. Shanahan is a Lecturer in the Department of History and an Associate Research Scholar at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. He teaches courses on (North) American immigration and citizenship policy and comparative US and Canadian political and legal history. He served as a postdoctoral associate at Yale's Center for the Study of Representative Institutions, earned his PhD and MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and received his BA from McGill University. His work has appeared in The Catholic Historical Review, Law and History Review, and the Washington Post, among other publications.